Shoulda, coulda, woulda…
Via Daily Mail:
Former Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday during an appearance on Face the Nation that he thinks former president Barack Obama should have enforced his ‘red line’ warning in Syria and thinks the United States paid a price as a result.
Kerry said he thought Obama was going to launch a missile strike in Syria in 2013 after the country attacked its own citizens with chemical weapons.
A year before the attack, Obama had warned Syrian president Bashar al-Assad that the use of chemical weapons would be a ‘red line’ that would be a ‘game changer’ for US involvement in Syria.
‘I thought we were going to go forward. I thought that weekend was the weekend. I expected the phone call to be telling me that he had decided we were striking that night or whatever was going to happen, and it wasn’t,’ Kerry said on Face the Nation.
I put several ideas on the table. The president was not persuaded by my argument. I believed that we had several options we could have done at very low risk to be able to make it clear to Assad that when we had a ceasefire and when he said he was going to live by it, he had to live by it. And I thought we should have done that.’
Kerry said he thinks the US ‘paid a price’ because Obama did not stand by his warning.